And then there were {checks QueryTracker} seven.

Seven queried agents left to hear back from. Seven potential full requests. Eight potential rejections. 

While I attempt to make authoring happen, my seven–year-old is learning how to be a person. We’ll call him Squish, a nickname that never caught on in real life but worked well when he was an infant for internet purposes.

The other day Squish lamented that every time he thinks of a game to play with friends, no one seems interested. He didn’t say it, but I know the impetus of these feelings stemmed from a recent birthday party he attended.

I see his logic. No one likes his games, ergo they must be bad. As an adult I also saw a birthday party with a lot of children of various ages, none of whom really knew each other well. And they all wanted to play different things because they had different interests.

I could have pointed all of this out. I could have also pointed out the fun he had and how he rejected game ideas from the other kids. But I got a query rejection earlier that day so I too was feeling a bit like my ideas were bad.

I put down my book and validated his feelings. Having our ideas rejected feels really bad. As we grow up we’ll have ideas and people won’t always like them. Sometimes they are legitimately bad ideas and we need other people to tell us why our ideas won’t work. Sometimes we have good ideas and some people just don’t like them. Sometimes they don’t like them in the moment but they’ll like them next week. 

I explained to him that this happens to adults all the time and it can still feel crummy. I told him about my book being rejected and how even though I know it’s a good idea, it still feels bad when someone says they don’t like it. 

But, not even 30 minutes before Squish and I had that conversation a friend gave me a lot of positive feedback about the book and they really enjoyed it. So I told Squish that too. Sometimes we’re sharing our ideas with the wrong people and there are other people who think our ideas are really amazing.

He’s a pretty introspective kid so when I was done he responded with a curious, 

“oh” and that was it. 

The conversation was over, but I’m sure the lesson stuck with him. It won’t prevent the emotions that come with being rejected. I do hope that it will help him build some level of discomfort tolerance and resilience so he doesn’t spiral into self doubt like I spent so much of my life doing. 

If that’s the silver lining that comes out of my book getting rejected, I’ll take seven more.

But I’d really rather not.